Development

Very few people are willing to pay for content any more, be it music, news, or apps. Singers are seeing revenues plummet thanks to streaming, web sites are folding due to lack of income, and developers aren't able to feed their families simply by selling through the App Store. There are some notable exception, but increasingly creating content is becoming unsustainable. Perhaps new business models will emerge, perhaps not. For now, it's a harsh reality the various industries are just starting to come to terms with.

Like so very many apps, Pinterest recently updated their look and feel to better match Apple's newly redesigned iOS 7. What exactly does it take to bring one of the world's most popular social networks to the latest version of one of the world's most popular platforms? Making Pinterest:

Marco Arment of the popular read it later service Instapaper has an interesting take on what iOS 7 means for app development and how it's a great opportunity to take advantage of an already saturated market.

App Camp for Girls is a new non-profit organization based in Portland, Ore. hoping to get its feet off the ground through a fundraising campaign through the crowdfunding platform Indiegogo.

There's a huge gender disparity in software development - men dramatically outnumber women. The goal is to get tween and teen girls interested in software development by pairing them with women instructors, helping them to build their own apps and hopefully inspire them to pursue careers in software development. They'd like to scale the program nationally, though it's starting locally in Portland, Ore.

If you need another example of how Microsoft often seems to operate more like a Keiretsu than a company, here's one of a new series of videos from them... highlighting Mac and iOS developers. In this case, it's rockstar developer Brent Simmons of NetNewsWire and Glassboard fame, and it's all to highlight Microsoft's cloud platform, Windows Azure for MSDN.

Sam Vermette of The Transit App wanted multi-colored versions of the little pulsating blue dot Apple uses to show your current location in maps, and Apple doesn't expose a public way to do that. So, he had to rebuild it from scratch. Or, in more technical terms, according to Vermette's blog:

Time was you could create any simple app you wanted, get it approved, then sneak back in and change the screenshots displayed in the App Store to make it look like your scam app was Minecraft or Pokemon or any damn thing you pleased. That time's over. Apple today announced that when an app is approved with a certain set of screenshots, it stays with those screenshots unless and until a developer submits an update for approval.

The second day of the second annual Cingleton Symposium -- Ç deux -- was all about the presentations. With Guy English serving as master of ceremonies, a series of all-star developers, designers, media, took turns on the stage.

Big Cave Games kicks off their inaugural iOS title today, ORC: Vengeance. It's a polished dungeon-crawling hack-and-slash adventure, which you can read more about in our review over here. After hearing about the fledgling studio's history in PC and console games, we decided to toss a few questions their way.